The Silent Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

you let us in the building?”
    At last the lock buzzed open.
    The building was at least a hundred years old, and the wooden steps groaned as Jane and Frost climbed the stairs. When they reached the second floor, a door swung open and Jane caught a glimpse into a cramped apartment, from which two girls stared out with curious eyes. The younger was about the same age as Jane’s daughter, Regina, and Jane paused to smile and murmur hello.
    Instantly the smaller girl was snatched up into a woman’s arms and the door slammed shut.
    “Guess we’re the big bad strangers,” said Frost.
    They kept climbing. Past the fourth-floor landing and up a narrow set of steps to the roof. The exit was unlocked, but the door gave off a piercing squeal as they swung it open.
    They stepped out into the predawn gloom, lit only by the diffuse glow of city lights. Shining her flashlight, Jane saw a plastic table and chairs, flowerpots of herbs. On a sagging clothesline, a full load of laundry danced like ghosts in the wind. Through the flapping sheets, she spotted something else, something that lay near the roof’s edge, beyond that curtain of linen.
    Without saying a word, both she and Frost automatically took paper shoe covers from their pockets and bent down to pull them on. Only then did they duck under the hanging sheets and cross toward what they had glimpsed, their booties crackling over the tar-paper surface.
    For a moment neither spoke. They stood together, flashlights trained on a congealed lake of blood. On what was lying in that lake.
    “I guess we found the rest of her,” said Frost.

C HINATOWN SAT IN THE VERY HEART OF BOSTON, TUCKED UP against the financial district to the north and the green lawn of the Common to the west. But as Maura walked under the
paifang
gate, with its four carved lions, she felt as if she were entering a different city, a different world. She’d last visited Chinatown on a Saturday morning in October, when there had been groups of elderly men sitting beneath the gate, sipping tea and playing checkers as they gossiped in Chinese. On that cold day she’d met Daniel here for a dim sum breakfast. It was one of the last meals they would ever eat together, and the memory of that day now pierced like a dagger to the heart. Although this was a bright spring dawn, and the same checkers-playing men sat chattering in the morning chill, melancholy darkened everything she saw, turning sunshine to gloom.
    She walked past restaurants where seafood tanks teemed with silvery fish, past dusty import shops crammed with rosewood furniture and jade bracelets and fake ivory carvings, into a thickening crowd of bystanders. She spotted a uniformed Boston PD cop towering over the mostly Asian crowd and worked her way toward him.
    “Excuse me. I’m the ME,” she announced.
    The cold look he gave her left no doubt that the police officer knew exactly who she was. Dr. Maura Isles, who’d betrayed the brotherhood of those tasked to serve and protect. Whose testimony might send one of their own to prison. He didn’t say a word, just stared at her, as if he had no idea what she expected of him.
    She returned the stare, just as coldly. “Where is the deceased?” she asked.
    “You’d have to ask Detective Rizzoli.”
    He was not going to make this easy for her. “And where is she?”
    Before he could answer, she heard someone call out: “Dr. Isles?” A young Asian man in a suit and tie crossed the street toward her. “They’re waiting for you up on the roof.”
    “Which way up?”
    “Come with me. I’ll walk you up the stairs.”
    “Are you new to homicide? I don’t believe we’ve met.”
    “Sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Detective Johnny Tam, with District A-1. Rizzoli needed someone from the neighborhood to translate, and since I’m the generic Chinese guy, I got pulled onto her team.”
    “Your first time working with homicide?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Always been a dream of mine. I only made